Anyone who’s hoped to escape the popularity contests of highschool might be a little disappointed if they ever got a job in B2B marketing. The real challenge though isn’t just the fact that these contest are more intense from competing for high profile corporate attention. It’s also because all that intensity’s just been magnified as online technology throws itself in the mix with offline marketing.

It’s not really the fault of technology that more companies have increased integrating an online marketing approach (whether it’s just adding a page on Facebook or reformatting their email templates for mobile readers). It just sort of happened.

As Halloween is priming the consumer market, retailers themselves are realizing how much of the target market is actually expanding beyond the kiddies and the candy bags. If these retailers are your target market, it’s only natural for you to experience this kind of revelation right alongside them. Never underestimate how consumer sentiment eventually ripples out to impact B2B sales leads.

This points to a much larger reality that businesses are bound to face (especially as their startup days grow further and further away). When target markets change, it’s inevitable ripple effect on everyone in the supply chain.

In business, few rules can truly stand the test of time. Ironically, one such rule is that you should always brace for change. This change can take you to unexpected places and sometimes cause you to uncomfortable decisions like changing the very core identity of your business.

When the time comes to change the party line, are your B2B marketers prepared?

Without a doubt, B2B marketing is a prime source of revenue. It’s become more than a way for companies to pitch products to potential customers. Whether it is a door-to-door sales or online advertising, it’s a medium of communication.

Yet in the recent years, there’s been a greater demand for unique (and unconventional) marketing campaigns that can attract even more elusive prospects. For example, sometimes the marketing department alone won’t be enough to execute a marketing strategy. Sometimes you bring in even the CEO himself both in terms of advertising as well as casting his life as an industry thought leader.

It’s easy to think that sales leads are subjective. More specifically, plenty of organizations have marketers and salespeople constantly go back and forth on defining leads that actually produce sales.

What about social media, though? It’s not news that critics love to decry the medium for actually destroying social skills. But from that debate, you can only ask: What defines as social?

Ours is the age high tech information. However, this has plenty people fearing for the future of humanity. As of 2013, today’s average attention span has shrunk down to eight seconds. You can already hear it now. “Nobody reads anymore.” “Kids don’t appreciate fine attention to detail.” “Technology makes us dumb.”

This may sound sagely at first but you shouldn’t adopt this sort of thinking for your email marketing campaign. Why? It’s because it’s an excuse. This makes it easy to shift the blame of bad marketing to something you think is beyond your control.

Yet, by thinking this way you are making prospects and customers the real victim.

Like many social media trends, the Ice Bucket Challenge has received its customary scorn from the crowd that scorns them best. The whole thing seems to reek with the cheesy, millennial stupidity that seems to belie a lack of creativity than an abundance of it.

At least, that’s what you’ll hear from people who typically sling eggs at anything to do with social media. Yet in spite of their argumentation, enlightenment, and sympathetic disillusionment, one thing hasn’t changed.

Not all marketing experiments are corporate invasions of privacy. On the other hand, sometimes experiments themselves need to be utilized within the private confines of your own organization. This extends to the ones you do on the internet.

Ask yourself, how do you expect to improve your B2B marketing strategy if you’re not testing out your ideas? Everything can sound all too good in theory. You’ll have to put it into practice and it may not be worth wasting more of your marketing dollars in case something goes wrong.